What they knew about their torture victims

Yesterday I read that Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who was Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, has provided a sworn statement to assist the International Human Rights Clinic at Willamette University College of Law in Oregon and the Federal Public Defender who are suing US officials for the wrongful detention and torture of Adel Hassan Hamad. Hamad was a humanitarian aid worker from Sudan working in Pakistan when he was kidnapped from his apartment, tortured, and shipped to Guantanamo where he was held for five years before being released. We have known for a long time that most of the detainees held at Guantanamo were innocent of terrorism, but I don't recall that anyone inside the Bush Administration has ever admitted that the Administration knew as early as August 2002 that this was the case. But Wilkerson says that

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld “indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons” and many in the administration knew it. The wrongfully held prisoners were not released because of political maneuverings aimed in part to cover up the mistakes of the administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who served in the U.S. Army for over thirty years, signed a sworn declaration for an Oregon federal court case stating that he found out in August 2002 that the US knew that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were not enemy combatants. Wilkerson also discussed this in a revealing and critical article on Guantanamo for the Washington Note.

How did Colonel Wilkerson first learn about the innocents in Guantanamo? In August 2002, Wilkerson, who had been working closely with Colin Powell for years, was appointed Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State. In that position, Wilkerson started attending daily classified briefings involving 50 or more senior State Department officials where Guantanamo was often discussed.

It soon became clear to him and other State Department personnel “that many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all.”

How was it possible that hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners were innocent? Wilkerson said it all started at the beginning, mostly because U.S. forces did not capture most of the people who were sent to Guantanamo. The people who ended up in Guantanamo, said Wilkerson, were mostly turned over to the US by Afghan warlords and others who received bounties of up to $5000 per head for each person they turned in. The majority of the 742 detainees “had never seen a U.S. soldier in the process of their initial detention.”

Military officers told Wilkerson that “many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.” The U.S. knew “that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo detainees had been turned in to U.S. forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money.”

As a consequence, said Wilkerson “there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place.”

Wilkerson wrote that the American people have no idea of the “utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the initial stages…Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.”


....In addition, the statement points out “a separate but related problem was that often absolutely no evidence relating to the detainee was turned over, so there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place.”

“The initial group of 742 detainees had not been detained under the processes I was used to as a military officer,” Wilkerson said. “It was becoming more and more clear that many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military. If there was any evidence, the chain of protecting it had been completely ignored.”

Several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this early on and knew “of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released,” wrote Wilkerson.

So why did the Bush Administration not release the men from prison once it was discovered that they were not guilty? Why continue to keep innocent men in prison?

“To have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers,” wrote Wilkerson.

“They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released,” according to Wilkerson. “I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.”

Speaking of Guantanamo and the US Government's disregard for detainees' legal rights, which disregard has everything to do with their atrocious and flagrant violation of detainees' human rights, today I happened to have read about artist Matt Cornell's performance piece featuring Yoo Toilet Paper, staged yesterday in the restrooms of UC-Berekeley's law school to protest the presence of John Yoo, author of the Bush Administraiton's infamous torture memos, on the School of Law's faculty.

The torture memos, in case you've forgotten, offered, in the words of the ACLU, "dozens of legal opinions meant to permit gross violations of domestic and international law." Each roll of Cornell's Yoo Toilet Paper contains text from the Convention Against Torture (which John Yoo disregarded in his memos). A short video of Matt Cornell and his fellow performers distributing the toilet paper can be seen here. One question did occur to me: why did Cornell put the text of a convention he would like to see honored on what people will be using to wipe their asses with? If it had been my piece, I would have put some of Yoo's text on the paper instead. But I suppose he was going for the ironic effect... something I'm not sure really works in this particular instance.

Zero dB: Against the Use of Music as an Instrument of Torture

The human rights organization Reprieve has launched a campaign against the use of music as an instrument of torture, specifically at the US's Guantanamo gulag, where such use of music has featured in many accounts from inmates and prison personnel reporting human rights abuses at that prison. The campaign is being led by numerous musicians and is supported by the UK's Musicians Union. (A quick qualification here: not all musicians are horrified at the thought that their music has become an instrument of torture, and I don't mean to imply that everyone whose music is being used in this way is appalled at the thought. Hmm... I wonder if it's true that if you're generally supportive of the whole idea of torture that you're happy to see your art destroying the minds of prisoners. Now that I think about it, I don't suppose it is necessarily true: if you supported the idea of torture and also believed in the purity of your art, I suppose it's conceivable that you might not want your work used in that way...)

Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) offers an elaborate analysis of how essential the stripping of the cultural functions of the objects in the prisoner's small world is to the structure of torture. Walls, toilet, bed, bathtub, doors, door frames all become weapons of the torturer, thus not only becoming sources of pain, but also unmaking the world the prisoner lives in: denying that there is anything but pain and the social isolation that pain necessarily brings.

Beside the overwhelming fact that a human being is being severely hurt, the exact nature of the weapon or the miming of the deconstruction of civilization is at most secondary. But it is also crucial to see that the two are here forced into being expressions and amplifications of one another: the de-objectifying of the objects, the unmaking of the made, is a process externalizing the way in which the person's pain causes his world to disintegrate; and, at the same time, the disintegration of the world is here, in the most literal way possible, made painful, made the direct cause of the pain. (41)

So, though it might seem bizarrely perverse to use music (which musicians perform and composers compose to give pleasure and emotional and spiritual sustenance to listeners) solely to inflict so much pain on those forced to listen to it that prisoners are driven to bash their heads into concrete walls to try to escape it, such (mis)use is actually consistent with the phenomenology of torture that Scarry so painstakingly elaborates.

Scarry notes, also, that the difficulty of articulating pain

permits political and perceptual complications of the most serious kind. The failure to express pain-- whether the failure to objectify its attributes or instead the failure, once those attributes are objectified, to refer them to their original site in the human body-- will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power. (14)

I suspect it's difficult for many people to take the notion that music can be used to cause pain seriously. The first time I heard of music being used in this way was back at the end of 1989 or the beginning of 1990, in a New York Times report that US forces were blasting rock music at Manuel Noriega, 24/7, to force him out of his hiding place and surrender. The tone of the report was mocking-- Noriega, it said, loved opera and hated rock and roll. And that, the article implied, was the reason Noriega couldn't stand it: that it was a matter of bombarding him with music he hated. As I recall, the article listed some of the albums played-- the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, and so on-- as though to say, who could object to being blasted with good music?

The music being used at Guantanamo to unmake its prisoners' world includes

• AC/DC - Hell's Bells
• AC/DC - Shoot to Thrill
• Aerosmith
• Barney the Purple Dinosaur - theme tune
• Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive
• Britney Spears
• Bruce Springsteen - Born in the USA
• Christina Aguilera - Dirrty
• David Gray - Babylon
• Deicide - Fuck Your God
• Don McLean - American Pie
• Dope - Die MF Die
• Dope - Take Your Best Shot
• Dr. Dre
• Drowning Pools - Bodies
• Eminem - Kim
• Eminem - Slim Shady
• Eminem - White America
• Li'l Kim
• Limp Bizkit
• Matchbox Twenty - Gold
• Meat Loaf
• Metallica - Enter Sandman
• Neil Diamond - America
• Nine Inch Nails - March of the Pigs
• Nine Inch Nails - Mr. Self-Destruct
• Prince - Raspberry Beret
• Queen - We are The Champions
• Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name Of
• Red Hot Chilli Peppers
• Saliva - Click Click Boom
• Sesame Street - theme tune
• Tupac - All Eyes on Me

Several articles were published today, attempting to articulate how painful this experience has been for the prisoners subjected to it. The AP's article is here, the Guardian's is here, and the Telegraph's is here. The Musicians Union has a press release here.

This is from the AP article:

Ruhal Ahmed, a Briton who was captured in Afghanistan, describes excruciating sessions at Guantanamo Bay. He said his hands were shackled to his feet, which were shackled to the floor, forcing him into a painful squat for periods of up to two days.

"You're in agony," Ahmed, who was released without charge in 2004, told Reprieve. He said the agony was compounded when music was introduced, because "before you could actually concentrate on something else, try to make yourself focus on some other things in your life that you did before and take that pain away.

"It makes you feel like you are going mad," he said.

* * * *

Not all of the music is hard rock. Christopher Cerf, who wrote music for "Sesame Street," said he was horrified to learn songs from the children's TV show were used in interrogations.

"I wouldn't want my music to be a party to that," he told AP.

* * * *

Morello, of Rage Against the Machine, has been especially forceful in denouncing the practice. During a recent concert in San Francisco, he proposed taking revenge on President George W. Bush.

"I suggest that they level Guantanamo Bay, but they keep one small cell and they put Bush in there ... and they blast some Rage Against the Machine," he said to whoops and cheers.

Some musicians, however, say they're proud that their music is used in interrogations. Those include bassist Stevie Benton, whose group Drowning Pool has performed in Iraq and recorded one of the interrogators' favorites, "Bodies."

"People assume we should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is annoying enough that played over and over it can psychologically break someone down," he told Spin magazine. "I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that."

One prisoner, two years after his release, described the experience in this way:

Asked to describe the experience, Vance said: "It sort of removes you from you. You can no longer formulate your own thoughts when you're in an environment like that."

"It sort of removes you from you." To me, this sounds very much about what Scarry was talking about.

Who Can Listen to Such Crap in Silence?

I can just imagine the scene: a dinner in Washington D.C. hosted by the Federalist Society, attended by prominent judges and lawyers, all notably conservative. Attorney General Michael Muaksey is speaking. For the national media, of course, the dramatic moment last Thursday night came when Mukasey began slurring his speech and then collapsed at the podium. Here in Seattle, though, the real drama of the evening occurred earlier in his speech, when a Washington State Supreme Court Justice, Richard Sanders, could no longer stomach listening in silence to Mukasey's defense of the Bush Administration's detainment practices at Guantanamo Bay and its interpretation of the Geneva Conventions.

"Frankly, everybody in the room was applauding or sometimes laughing, and I thought, 'I've got to stand up and say something.' And I did," Sanders told The Seattle Times on Tuesday. "I stood up and said, 'Tyrant,' then I sat down again, then I left."

. . . .

Sanders said: "I think it was an impulse. ... At that particular time, I didn't have a chance to reflect on it. I didn't plan it out in advance. It just happened."

He left before Mukasey's speech was finished, Sanders said, because "I wasn't enjoying myself."

Sanders said he wouldn't call what he did heckling. Afterward, he said, he heard from a number of people — some supportive, others not. "Some people think it was the wrong thing to do," he said. "To other people, it was heroic."

Sanders said he now regrets what he did: "If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't."

Alternatively, he wishes he had said "Tyranny" instead of "Tyrant," "because in my mind, these policies can lead to tyranny."

Read the whole story by Ken Armstrong in the Seattle Times here.

No Right to Due Process Here

Last month the US Supreme Court ruled that detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have a right under habeas corpus to challenge their detention in a civil court. Apparently that right is meaningless, for Agence France Presse reports that the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, VA., has just ruled that the President of the United States may jail people arrested on US soil indefinitely, without charge. It seems that the Bush Administration's legal fiction of "enemy combatant"-- someone who is neither a soldier (and thus, when detained, a prisoner of war and thus afforded the protection of the Geneva Conventions) nor a civilian (and thus considered a human being afforded standard human rights)-- trumps all. According to the 4th Circuit Court, the only right the detainees at Guantanamo have is that of challenging the designation. And if a court decides to allow them to be branded with the legal fiction, then they have no human rights, just as the Bush Administration has been claiming all along.

Legal fictions, of course, are endlessly elastic. That's the reason they're so dangerous. Just something to bear in mind.

P.S. In an article yesterday, The Toronto Star provided a link to a brief You Tube clip of the 7-hour video of an interrogation of Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was incarcerated at Guantanamo when he was 15. He was shot twice in the back and captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan.

Indefinite Detention without Trial Ruled Unconstitutional

Now that the weather has finally broken 60 degrees Fahrenheit here in Seattle, I'm leaving very early tomorrow morning for North Carolina. (The sun's even out!) In haste, I'd like to call attention to a US Supreme Court decision that most people have probably already heard about: the High Court has ruled in a 5-4 decision that detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a constitutional right to challenge their detentions in federal court and that congressional legislation has failed to provide a reasonable substitute for such a hearing. Although Congress has helped the Bush Administration get around the previous rulings attempting to curtail its abuses of prisoners, this decision goes straight to the premise on which the whole sorry structure of the administration's detention policies rests. As ABC News writes:

The ruling invalidates portions of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which created military tribunals to hear the cases of those held at Guantanamo.

The decision was 5-4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the four liberal justices on the court.

Writing for the majority opinion striking down the Military Commissions Act, Kennedy wrote, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

Interesting to note that John McCain's first reaction is to seem puzzled that foreigners might be afforded the same civil rights as citizens:

"These are unlawful combatants. They are not American citizens, and I think we should pay attention to Justice Roberts' opinion in this decision," McCain said. "But it is a decision that the Supreme Court has made; now we need to move forward. As you know, I always favored closing Guantanamo Bay and I still think we ought to do that."

Read the whole article here, though I'll warn you that I find some of its wording dubious. (It more than once claims that "Military lawyers say..." as though all military lawyers support the statements so attributed, regardless of the fact that many military lawyers are profoundly disturbed by Guantanamo and the Administration's detention policies and some have even sacrificed their careers to oppose them.)

I'll be away from home for the next week, by the way, and suspect that I'll be without an Internet connection the entire time. If you email me and I don't respond, that's likely the reason why.

Public Service

People of conscience have, on many fronts, been stepping up the pressure urging an end to the disgrace that is the US's gulag in Guantanamo. Last month Amnesty International launched a nationwide campaign that has been taking an exhibit depicting replica Gaunatanamo cells from city to city across the US. Now Witness Against Torture has entered the courtroom in Washington D.C. taking a bold challenge right into the judicial system.

Thirty-five activists charged with minor crimes following their protest at the US Supreme Court on January 11 have dressed in orange jumpsuits to express solidarity with the Guantanamo prisoners who have no access to a courtroom. They are all pro se defendants [i.e., without legal counsel or representation] who have taken the names of prisoners at Guantanamo and refused to give their own names. Father Bill Pickard, for instance, a 61-year old Catholic priest from Scranton, PA, is being tried as Faruq Ali Ahmed. In "Activists Appear in Court as Guantanamo Prisoners" in One World.net, Haider Rizvi quotes Father Pickard:

“I went to the Supreme Court to make a simple plea that the inhumane treatment and actual torture of inmates at Guantanamo Bay stop,” Pickard said. He said he went to bring the name and the humanity of Ahmed, who claimed that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 simply to teach the Koran to children and that he had no affiliation with the Taliban or al Qaeda.

“He cannot do it himself,” said Pickard, “so I am called by my faith, my respect for the rule of law, and my conscience to do it for him.”

In his statement, Daloisio told the judge: “As we stand before you today, we are aware that in the five months since our arrest, we have made it further in the criminal justice system than these men have in over six years,” referring to the plight of Guantanamo prisoners.

According to witnesses, the judge began to interrupt Daloisio once, but then let him complete his statement.

“We understand that you, Judge Gardner, are not the reason Guantanamo is still open,” Daloisio said. “It may be beyond your power to summon the men whose names appear on this court’s docket from their Guantanamo cells to face their charges and their accuser…to have their day in court.

“We mean no disrespect in our position towards this trial,” he added. “But we will not participate.”

After reading the statement, Daloisio and 12 other defendants remained silent for the duration of the trial.

Daloisio said he and the others on trial were “pro se defendants,” and thus refused to be represented by an attorney. “We will not exercise our rights when our country continues to deny the rights of others.”

Daloisio and the 34 other activists are facing charges related to “speeches, objectionable language…and assemblages” on Supreme Court grounds. Each count carries a maximum penalty of 60 days in jail, as well as fines and court fees.

The trial is due to continue through the rest of the week.

Witness Against Torture, a group that organized the Jan. 11 protests, said its campaign has drawn substantial support from a number of faith groups and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International.

This is my idea of public service. I am more grateful than I can say that many, many people are doing this work.

Read Rizvi's article here. And read "Reflection on Sami al- Haz" by Susan Crane, another activist in Witness Against Torture, here.